Meet the Coach?

I have sons and stepdaughters (still just daughters) ranging in ages from 18-25. All of them are in what I call the "pretend adult" stage, where they are young and independent, but still rely on parents to give guidance no matter if it's financial, life lessons, or just day to day housekeeping reminders, because the house doesn't clean itself. I want them to not need me or their mom, but I also want them to always know to reach out before things get too deep. Finding that balance is one of the hardest things to do as a young adult.

I have gone through divorce and survived. In fact, my ex and I are great friends to this day and those stepdaughters will always be mine, no matter what. We were friends, we tried marriage and found that wasn't working for us after several years of trying, so we talked about everything and decided to go back to being best friends like we were before. 

Through the last 20 years, my family had a lot of very hard times. I had my bouts with depression brought on by financial and medical issues for the family. We have gone through childhood cancer, a rare leg disease, major back surgeries, liver failure, and kidney failure. Not all at the same time or on the same person, thankfully. And like so many people, we have dealt with loss of loved ones. 

When I say my Adult Career, I mean the jobs where I spent all time dealing with adults instead of children. Even though, sometimes that is very much the same thing. I have over 20 years of working with people directly, be it in person or through a phone or computer. 

I was management at a bowling alley for quite a while. Usually when people were upset there, they were also drunk making it even worse. That also involved working with a lot of kids. Then I sold cars for a while where a huge part of the training is learning how to read people and talk to them. Years of my life was running contact centers where I brought on new staff, trained them, taught them how to talk to people and even how to de-escalate their own customers. 

Eventually, I grew tired of working with adults because of how they treated each other. My youngest daughter told me I should try being a substitute teacher at her school, so I did. I had no idea I would love working with kids so much, but I knew that is what I wanted to do. My day job now is still working at that same school, where I get to work with all 700+ students each week. To those kids, I am probably the toughest adult in the building, and arguably the most loved at the same time. 

I was 17 when I started coaching bowling. It was younger kids at first, but it wasn't long before I was coaching kids my own age and even adults. I always loved bowling, and I was really good at it, but coaching was an entirely different part of the sport that I felt I was made for. Then my daughters got old enough to get into softball. The next thing I know I am coaching a bunch of girls, some of them knowing what they are doing and most of them not having a clue. 

You might already be imagining what it is like dealing with an entire team of teenage girls, but as bad as you may think it was, I promise it was worse. Not really because of the girls though, because of the parents. A bleacher full of adults all thinking their daughters are the perfect princess, not taking the time to look at the truth of the situation. Some of those girls stunk, yet I managed to keep them all wanting to come back.